I think it’s fair to say that most of the success factors in market farming can be described in a bell curve. As the bell curve implies, most of us have okay access to markets, and we farm ground that’s okay for market farming. We have okay business acumen, okay marketing skills, okay land-access arrangements. Our available labor is largely okay, we have okay innate organizational skills, and okay willpower to get out there and get the right work done on the right day.

Most of our models in farming, however, have something more than okay: they’ve got several factors located far out to the right on the bell curve. They’re located close to concentrations of wealth and enthusiasm for social righteousness and good food. They got into the market at just the right time. They inherited land or bought it on the cheap. They acquired business acumen in another line of work. They discovered what they wanted to do early in life and had a few dominoes tip in just the right way. They’ve inherited or developed the traits that help them stay organized, intuit what needs to be done, and relate well to people.

That’s not to say that our models don’t work hard, develop new skills, enhance value, innovate, and do a thousand other things right day in and day out. If you’re going to succeed in this business – any business! – you’ve got to do a lot more than get lucky. And “getting lucky” is almost always a function of hard work and smarts in addition to having life’s dice roll your way. “Making it” in market farming, especially over the long haul, is never handed to you on a silver platter. (If it is, I haven’t seen an example.)

But it does mean that many of our models in farming can get away with things that those of us without a stack of lucky breaks at our backs can’t. They can get away without a monthly cash-flow budget, or filling out financial statements, or getting a line of credit at the bank. They don’t need to understand financing because they don’t have to incur debt in order to reach their goals. They don’t require a system for employee management because it just comes naturally to them.

The rest of us need to stack the deck – and the best way to stack the deck is to increase the intentionality that we bring to the management of the farm. And that means increasing our use of the plan-monitor-control cycle.

And if there’s one area that drives everything else when it comes to management, it’s money. Because money is the bottom-line expression of value and ability to continue farming in our world. That’s not to say that money has to guide everything you do, but money provides the foundation that allows every other expression of our values to be present in the world. It allows us to farm another year.

And this time of year – right now, as a matter of fact! – is the best time to put together the three key tools you need to monitor your farm’s financial performance: a balance sheet, an accrual-adjusted income statement, and a statement of cash flows. As we move towards the start of the new year, it’s the perfect time to take inventories of our supplies, and set aside an hour on New Year’s Eve to check balances on our bank accounts, accounts receivable and payable, loans, and credit cards.

These three tools, conventional as they are, can provide insights into your farming operation, especially when compiled year after year, when plugged into various farm financial ratios, as described in resources such as this Farm Financial Scorecard. Tracking these year after year can provide not only important measurements of your farm’s performance, they can also help diagnose problems and provide an early warning of negative trends in your business.

(Please see the October and November issues of Growing for Market – available here if you don’t subscribe already – for my articles on assembling financial statements, as well as the book, Fearless Farm Finances, which I coauthored.)

We all want to spend more time focused on the things we want to focus on. We want to farm, not (pick one or more) clean the packing shed, do the bookkeeping, fill out the records, market CSA shares…

Likewise, our employees want to get their jobs done - they want to bag the spinach, pick the chard, transplant the broccoli, rather than keeping the records and adjusting the transplanter.

Too often, critical tasks end up being “not the job.” I’ve seen large farms without records, discovered fields of freshly transplanted lettuce with the top of the soil block sticking out of the soil, and irrigation running with only half of the sprinklers turning - but at least the water was on, the lettuce wasn’t in the greenhouse, and the crops were getting harvested!

On my own farm, critical tasks often didn’t get the attention they were due, because they were treated as extras until the moment they had to be done - writing CSA newsletters, bookkeeping, greasing zerks on machinery, even the record-keeping (and we had a reputation to uphold!).

It didn’t change until we began to make things “part of the job.” Rather than writing CSA newsletters after the kids were in bed the night before deliveries, we began to dedicate time early in the week. I set up a system to rapidly sort bills and receipts as they came in to make bookkeeping easier, and set aside an hour a week to entering them into QuickBooks. We developed a system of written plans and instructions that were incorporated into the same sheet of paper where the records were kept, so that the record-keeping was already in the same place as the work that was being done.

We also worked to be clear about what the job actually was: harvest wasn’t finished until the quantities and fields were recorded in the right place; and we stopped just “getting the lettuce out” and “getting the irrigation running” and started defining what done looked like.

To make something “part of the job,” you need to do one of two things: dedicate time and resources, or make the task inseparable from the work.

Lee Zieke, of northeast Iowa’s Willoglen Nursery, told me a long time ago that, “You’ve got to capture the pain while it’s fresh.”

Since we can't remember everything we encounter, our brains have a mechanism for purging information that isn't needed any more. As circumstances change, your brain dumps the information it had been keeping immediately accessible, making room for newly relevant data. And in the middle of the market farming season, there's always a ton of newly relevant data!

The unfortunate implication of this is that the problems that created the most stress and misfortune in August - the inability of employees to properly cull tomatoes, the grain drill that wasn't cleaned out after spring cover cropping and now needs to have the mice and birds cleaned out of it before seeding that first crop of rye and vetch, the discovery that you don't have sufficient spinach seed to seed your fall crop (and Johnny's is sold out of the variety you need!) - fade by the time you really have time to implement long-term solutions.

That doesn't mean you have to solve the problems while they're staring you in the face. You just need to capture the problem now, and put it in a place where you can come back to it after the crops and the work slow down.

Keeping a Universal Information Capture Device close at hand is a sure way to be able to capture pain points. My two favorite UICDs are pen and paper (I like the Hipster PDA and a Fisher Space Pen), and the camera on my smart phone. You don't need long explanations - "tomato culling issues" will make a find stand-in for "The crew has a difficult time knowing when a blemish has reached a sufficient size to warrant culling," and a picture of the bird's nest in the grain drill chute will remind you of the problems there.

Captured information needs a place to go where you can find it easily at the right time. Notecards from the Hipster PDA go into a file folder labeled "Pain Points to Review in November". Smartphone photos are instantly emailed to myself, and tagged (if you use Gmail) or filed (if you use Outlook or Thunderbird) as "Pain Points to Review."

In November (or when your season slows down in your climate), review the pain points, and decide what to do about them when you have the time, energy, and focus to develop effective solutions.

The office has always been an important part of my farm. Unfortunately, the farm’s office work often takes a back seat until the sun has set and the kids are fed. Too often, that back seat also means that we don’t take the time to make our office a more efficient, smooth-running part of our operation.Here in northeast Iowa, we still have some snow on the ground. Before things get too crazy with spring planting, it’s a great time to look into some key time-saving performance upgrades.Monthly Filing for Financials. Stop filing your paper financial documents by vendor, account, or anything else. Start filing them by month, instead. After you’ve processed a receipt or a bill into your accounting program, just put it in a file labeled, “March, 2014.” If you find you need to refer to it later, you’ll be able to look up the transaction in QuickBooks, and cross-reference it to the correct month; finding the occasional receipt this way will take far less time than filing every receipt in its own alphabetical system.Get a Headset. Market farming is all about communication. If you have to kink your neck or use a hand to talk, you can’t take care of other things at the same time. You can’t type notes on the computer, you can’t enter orders or take messages quickly, you can’t water the plants while you’re waiting on hold.In any case, you’re a farmer, and you don’t need a kinked neck leading to yet more chiropractor bills.Learn Some Keyboard Shortcuts. Every vegetable farmer knows that time spent moving your hands is time spent not working. When you have to move your hand from your keyboard to your mouse, that takes time; and then you have to move it back. Every program has keyboard shortcuts, and most of them are the same across every program on your operating system. Learn them. They take a little more time than mousing when you are first getting used to them, but a few sessions spent intentionally not using your mouse will pay huge dividends.A few of my favorites:

Ctrl + x = cut

Ctrl + c = copy

Ctrl + v = paste

Ctrl + n = new

Ctrl + s = save

Ctrl + a = select all text

Ctrl + z = undo most recent action

Home takes you to the beginning of the current line of text

Ctrl + Home takes you to the beginning of the document

Shift + Home highlights the text between your cursor and the beginning of the current line of text

Ctrl + shift + home highlights the text between your cursor and the beginning of the document

End works the same way, except that it takes you to the end of the line of text

Alt + Tab toggles between open windows

Ctrl + Tab toggles between tabs in your browser, or multiple windows in a program

By the way, most forms, whether in a database, in a spreadsheet, or on a website, can be navigated easily using the tab key to advance between fields. Type your first name, hit tab, and it takes you right where you want to enter your last name. Tab again to get to the address field. Shift tab takes you back to the previous field.Browser-based apps usually have their own shortcuts. I use Gmail to manage my email, and the keyboard shortcuts (see this link) allow me to manage my entire inbox from start to finish without ever touching my mouse.Besides, if I don’t touch my mouse, I can’t click on the bookmark for Facebook.Supercharge Your Keyboard Shortcuts. I have used a fantastic little program called ActiveWords since 2007 to do all kinds of things with just a few keystrokes. For example, if I type frwx, that immediately expands to “Flying Rutabaga Works”. Rsfx expands to Rock Spring Farm. Typing cellx expands to my phone number. Datex expands to today’s date in my preferred date format. Fsig expands to my business email signature; listx expands to the signature I use for list serves.I find it especially handy to use ActiveWords for hard-to-type words, such as post-harvest handling or E. coli 0157:H7.You can use ActiveWords to substitute text, insert formatted text, open websites, open programs, open files, open folders, and open control panels from anywhere you can enter text. Most of what you do on your computer you do over and over and over again; why not automate that, rather than clicking through multiple windows?Over the years, I have used ActiveWords to facilitate answering emails (csafull could expand to the standard statement you use to explain that your CSA is full), make data entry consistent, share data that I can’t remember (whslx expands to the url for Rock Spring Farm’s wholesale sheet, http://www.rsfarm.com/WholesaleSheet.pdf; tfrlink (short for The Flying Rutabaga link) expands to the link to sign up for this newsletter), and input a formula in a downloaded payroll report.Manage Your Passwords. Do you have time to deal with hacked accounts in August? Neither do I. Get LastPass to manage unique, high-security passwords for all of your accounts. LastPass uses a master password to bring all of your other passwords under one roof; an extension in your browser and an app on your phone make it easy to access and recall usernames and passwords for individual websites. I won’t pretend to understand the technology behind it, but I’ve seen enough referrals from people who do to go with it.The LastPass browser extension also provides form filling; unlike the form-fillers that already live in your Chrome or Firefox browser, you trigger the form to fill. You can even use LastPass to store credit card information so that you can fill payment information quickly and easily, without having to let web stores store your information.

Ever think of something that you need from another room, walk to the room to get it, and discover that you have no idea what you needed?

Or notice an incipient problem or opportunity and forget to do soemthing about it until it's too late?

My favorite is starting the tractor to plow the first snowfall of the season and realizing that I need to add some anti-gel to the diesel, then forgetting to do it until everything gels up. (Yes, this has happened to me. More than once.) Or seeing a tire on a field vehicle that is slightly underinflating, but failing to fill it up before it goes fully flat.

A 2011 article in Scientific American describes a series of experiments designed to explain this phenomenon. Basically, some forms of memory are optimized to keep information immediately available until it isn't needed any more. Since we can't remember everything we encounter, the brain has a mechanism for purging information that isn't needed any more. When you change locations or situations - whether it's moving from one room to another, answering a phone call, or stopping to chat with the mailman while you're plowing the driveway - your brain dumps the information it had been keeping immediately acccessible, making room for new, now-relevant information.

It may not be the best for remembering what you need when you go to the hardware store, but it certainly helped avoid saber-tooth tigers back on the savannah.

So we can't rely on our brains to keep track of information that we can't act on immediately. We need a little bit of technology. A universal information capture device is in order - and the best version doesn't run on iOS or Android. A pocket notebook and a pen - I prefer a sheaf of index cards held together with a binder clip, and a Fisher Space Pen - is the most basic, reliable way to quickly record a piece of information.

In my experience, a one- or two-word note is enough to jog the memory. The words "truck tire" is enough to make the rest of the information flood back in - or at least enough context to remind me that the tire's going flat, and I need to fill it and decide if it needs to be replaced.

Combined with a system for regularly reviewing the capture information - checking the notecards daily for things that need to be done - simple notes keep your brain from losing the information entirely, ensuring that you notice and act on things when they show up, instead of when they blow up.

We used to have a problem with counting. Every week, the harvest and packing logs would say that we had 180 bunches of Swiss chard, but we'd have 178. Either way, each week the CSA line would grind to a halt, and we would scurry around to harvest a couple of additional bunches, which wouldn't get properly washed and chilled before we packed them into the remaining CSA boxes.Or we'd have 210, meaning that 30 got composted because they didn't have a home.I tried emphasizing that getting the count right mattered. I talked about quality. I talked about 30 composted bunches represented wasted money and wasted resources. I explained how it held up the CSA line. I pleaded. And nothing worked.Finally, I added a new column to the harvest and packing logs where the person responsible for the count and the quality wrote his or her initials. I was certain that this would provide me with the tools I needed to find the responsible people and take corrective - or even disciplinary! - action. I had every expectation that I would soon have the opportunity to open a big ol' can of whoop-ass and solve this problem.But that didn't happen. Instead, suddenly, every count was right. It didn't just improve, it changed completely. We went from regularly mis-counting items to nailing the count time after time.As a result, I implemented this accountability all over the farm, anywhere we were keeping records or requiring tasks to be done. Pallet stacking sheets, closing checklists, tractor work directives, and bathroom cleaning logs all came with a place for the responsible worker to make his or her mark.A recent article in the New York Times shared the results of a study that monitored restaurant employee behavior for signs of theft. The surveillance did cut down on theft, but it also had the surprising side effect of encouraging employees to do the right thing: savings from theft were modest, but after installing the monitoring software, the revenue per restaurant increased by an average of 7 percent. Workers pulled back on unethical practices, but they also put more efforts into things like prompting customers to have dessert or a second beer. No whoop-ass necessary.Monitoring employee performance, whether actively by tracking productivity or passively by requiring accountability, changes behavior. The same people making mistakes, moving slowly, or simply not making the effort to do their job well can be set up to succeed. And that's a win for everyone.

A few people actually enjoy bookkeeping. For most of us, it’s a tedious job that we have to do, and all too easy to put on the back burner since it doesn’t produce the same visible, visceral results that building a fence or harvesting carrots does. Since it’s such an easy job to put off, it doesn’t take long to create a seemingly insurmountable pile of stuff with something scary likely lurking somewhere in the middle of it – and you don’t want to find yourself behind on paying bills when the weather’s finally right for killing weeds.Fortunately, modern bookkeeping tools and a good system for using them can make a big difference when it comes to cranking the bookkeeping widget. December is a great time to set up a new bookkeeping system, or revamp your old one, since the fiscal year starts on January 1, and you want to input your data in a consistent way throughout the year.A successful bookkeeping system has three important outcomes: facilitate cash flow budgeting, monitoring, and decision-making throughout the year; make it easy to analyze profitability; and provide documentation and data for taxes. Contrary to the way many bookkeeping systems are set up, the last of these is the least important. – completing a schedule F is a once-a-year event, and the data can be easily extracted from a good bookkeeping system that is organized around the priorities of providing you with the information you need.A successful bookkeeping system also has to be easy to use. Most farmers I know do their own bookkeeping, and even if you don’t, good bookkeepers don’t come cheap. That means you need systems that facilitate fast data entry and filing with a minimum of thought, especially if you are prone to doing bookkeeping after the field work is all done, or with a beer in hand.I use QuickBooks for my bookkeeping, and will refer to it throughout this article. I’ve looked at other bookkeeping software, and I know that everybody has their preferences, but I keep coming back to QuickBooks because it’s the industry standard. You can use the same organization and workflow described in my Growing for Market article with any bookkeeping system.The rest of this article is available from Growing for Market, as part of the November/December issue.

When Jack Hedin called me last summer to ask if I would take a look at some transplant production issues Featherstone Farm was having in their greenhouses, I had no idea or expectation that, one year later, Featherstone Farm would occupy such a large part of my time and attention. It’s been a great year, with many exciting and engaging challenges.

In over twenty years of working on and with organic vegetable farms around the country, including thirteen years of farming on my farm, I’ve noticed that most farms and their farmers just plow ahead, making decision after decision on what action to take next to keep the irrigation pumps running, the harvest crews picking, and the tractors in motion without consideration for larger impacts or processes. The race against the weather and the perishable nature of vegetable crops combine with scarce time and monetary resources to create a situation where farmers never get a chance to stand back and evaluate their operations, much less the time to make systematic and systemic changes to build the foundation for future improvements.

It reminds me a bit of parenting.

We put a lot of effort last winter into a rewritten business plan and refinancing. But just as importantly, we worked hard to put processes in place for the financial management of the business on an ongoing basis. Featherstone Farm now has not only a financial plan, it has a system in place for the periodic and timely monitoring of performance to that plan, as well as mechanisms for making corrections and replanning as necessary. Each month, the leadership team meets to review the farm’s income and expenditures relative to the plan – then, where things are not going right, we figure out how to correct them and assign responsibility for following through.

Weekly meetings of the leadership team provide an opportunity to check in and get everybody on the same page about progress made on addressing those financial issues, as well as other issues on the farm. The CSA team meets on a schedule to decide what’s going in the box and what’s going in the newsletter. And every Friday morning, the entire crew has a short stand-up meeting to make certain that everybody’s on the same page about the little and big things that keep the farm running smoothly, from rolling the windows up on the farm trucks and holiday work schedules to the process for reporting accidents and injuries and the importance of communication and teamwork to the farm’s success.

Farming is governed by rhythms and interruptions. We plant, cultivate, and harvest in cycles and patterns big and small, seeding onions in at the end of winter, harvesting lettuce in the cool of the morning. We weather floods and droughts, scramble to solve personnel crises, and shuffle the resources we need to get a critical piece of equipment repaired while the rest of the farm keeps running. And while weekly staff meetings and monthly financial reviews may be a part of many businesses, these larger patterns – independent of nature’s cycles, and recognizing the interface of agriculture with the larger culture of individuals, finance, and governance – occur all-too-rarely in the world of organic and local farming operations. To have the opportunity to join Featherstone Farm’s efforts to harness these processes to further the farm’s goals of making a difference in the world is truly an honor.Here's the original guest post on Featherstone Farm's blog.

Over the last twelve years, I’ve worked hard to develop systems at Rock Spring Farm that consistently provide our customers with clean, ready-to-use vegetables and herbs. As the farm grew beyond the size that could be operated by just one or two individuals, I’ve had to learn how to communicate the how-and-why of what we do to an ever-growing and ever-changing crew of individuals who flow through this operation from year to year.

I’ve had ample opportunity over the last few years to learn that I can’t possibly do it all myself. This wasn’t an easy lesson for this farmer to learn. I didn’t get into this business to manage people – in fact, like most farmers, I didn’t get into this business to manage a business! I got into this business to drive tractors and dig carrots and listen to the birds sing. But having employees on the farm enables me to make a living at the same time that it allows me the flexibility to pursue other projects beyond the day to day work of growing rutabagas.

Having well-trained and empowered employees also has a tremendous impact on my and my family’s quality of life. Without a competent and invested crew, I wouldn’t have the ability to leave the farm for days at a time on vacation, or even to attend mid-day events in town on days when we need to pack CSA boxes. And it’s not just vacations, but my ability to have an impact on the world of organic farming by serving actively on non-profit boards and providing education, outreach, and consulting to farmers around the country (not to mention co-directing the MOSES Organic Farming Conference).

On a small, diversified operation like Rock Spring Farm (we are the largest organic vegetable farm in Northeast Iowa, but still a rather small operation in the overall scheme of organic produce), everybody plays a variety of different roles on the farm. We don’t have a food safety manager who dedicates all of their time to watching out for regulatory and common-sense compliance; even a packing shed manager ends up riding on a transplanter. The fact that everybody has complicated and multi-faceted roles to play on the farm means that everybody needs access to a diverse array of knowledge about how to accomplish just about every task on the farm.

Last fall, when we decided to pursue a food safety certification through the USDA-GAPs program, we had to begin to document our procedures and improve our record-keeping to demonstrate that we did indeed implement the procedures we had documented. This has led to an effort to document our practices throughout the farm, an ongoing process that we expect to finish this winter. While’s it’s not a substitute for elbow-to-elbow training, a good operations manual will help ensure the continued smooth operation of the farm, and the consistent production of good food, good soil, and a great quality of life for everybody involved in the farm.